The Lutheran Hour
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"Just Around the Corner"
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Text: Romans 5:1-11
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Early one morning this last April, I was walking along the path in the city park just east of our house. Just around the corner, a teenage boy, skinny kid, carrying a backpack with a hoodie over his head, was drifting toward me, crossing the street and heading into the park. I noticed that if he kept on the same angle at the same pace, our paths would collide, like two tributaries coming together. But I was expecting that he would turn off to avoid me. Teenagers these days keep to themselves. Besides, I had important things to think about that morning; I wasn’t in the mood to talk. But he didn’t turn aside. I couldn’t tell whether he was intentionally timing his steps to match mine, or if from underneath his hoodie plugged into his earbuds, he didn’t even notice me. Whatever it was now the two of us were there on the same path, walking side by side.
Reluctantly, I broke out of my thoughts to make some small talk. “Are you walking to school?” I ask him. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I go to Bishop DuBourg.” It was strange that he called me sir. Kids here aren’t usually that respectful. The school he mentioned, Bishop DuBourg, is one of several Catholic high schools on the south side of St. Louis. “That’s pretty far,” I say. “How long does it take you?” “About 45 minutes,” he said, “maybe an hour.”
He said that he just lived around the corner with his mom and it was just the two of them in the house. He didn’t mention anything about a dad. They used to live in a small town with his grandparents. But after his grandparents died, he and his mom moved into the city. That was two years ago. “What’s your name?” I ask. “Michael,” he said. “Really? That’s my name, too?” “Yeah? There aren’t a lot of Michaels at my school, even though it’s a common name,” he told me. “Are you named after someone in your family?” I asked him. “Nah, probably just after someone famous like Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson.”
“My parents told me that I’m named after Michael, the angel in the Bible,” I told him. “Really? One of the priests at our school was talking about how the names in the Bible have special meanings and stuff. I wish I was named after Michael, the angel.” “Well, you should just claim that,” I said. “Michael’s job as an angel is to tell everyone about God, about how great He is and the great things He’s doing. His name means “who is like God.” It’s like a question so obvious it doesn’t need an answer.” Or, I thought later, it takes a lifetime to answer or maybe longer. And so, this unexpected conversation carried these two Michaels downstream into the day. Any minute I was expecting for him to break off in a different direction toward his school, but he kept on the path with me. “Actually,” he said, “I’m going to have some breakfast with some friends before school. This last summer, one of our friends from school died. He was on a moped, got hit by a drunk driver. This week would’ve been his 16th birthday, so we’re getting together to remember him.” “What was your friend’s name?” I asked him. “Sam,” he said.
“So, do you meet at someone’s house for breakfast?” “Actually, we meet at this old lady’s house called Grandma Peggy. She feeds us breakfast—eggs and bacon, pancakes, sometimes French toast.” We were just around the corner from my house now, so I ask him, “Do you know what street Grandma Peggy lives on?” “No, I just remember it by the buildings, and she’s not really my grandma. We just call her that.” I was curious now, so I changed my path to keep walking with him to see if I could find this mysterious Grandma Peggy.
We walk about a block further, but he still doesn’t know where the house is, and I had important things to do that day. So I say goodbye to Michael and start back home. As I walked, I wondered if Grandma Peggy was even real or if he was just fooling with me, calling me sir and all that. Maybe it was just a joke. He’d probably have a good laugh about it with his friends at school later that day, telling them about this wild story he made up and told to some old dude in the park, and he believed it.
I think I fell for his story because I wanted it to be true. See, in our city, you hear a lot about teen pregnancies and drug deals and gun violence. You hear a lot of anger about how things are going from bad to worse. You hear a lot of older people complaining about younger people, with their bad attitudes, and bad work ethic, and loud mouths and loud cars. But you don’t often hear about a Grandma Peggy, some mythical being who feeds strange teenagers breakfast before school on a Wednesday morning. “If she is real,” I thought, “we need an army of Grandma Peggys in this city.” But it was probably just a joke, and I was the butt of it. Kids these days.
When I got home, my daughter, Elise, asks me how my walk was, and I tell her about meeting this kid named Michael and about this person called Grandma Peggy, but that I didn’t know if she was real or not. Elise was just leaving the house to drive her car to the mechanic in the neighborhood. She’d run over a screw someone had tossed in the alley, but the tire was still holding enough air for her to make it to the shop. So she drove the car there, dropped it off, and walked back home.
Thirty minutes later, when Elise opens the front door and sees me, the first thing she says is, “I met Grandma Peggy.” “What? You’re joking?” I said. “No,” she said. “She’s real. I was walking home and I saw about 20 high school kids outside of this house getting into their cars, and I saw this lady out there. She said, ‘Hi,’ and so I said, ‘Are you Grandma Peggy?’ and she was. She said she makes breakfast for them, usually about six pounds of bacon and four dozen eggs. But this week she had ordered about 100 donuts to celebrate the birthday of that kid, Sam, who’d been killed. Sam had been Peggy’s grandson.”
Later, I learned that before he died, Sam and his friends used to go out for breakfast at a local diner on Wednesday mornings. One day Sam had said to his friends, “My Grandma Peggy makes better pancakes than this.” She heard about Sam’s bragging on her cooking, and so she told him and his friends, “Well, why don’t you come to my house for breakfast then. If you come, I’ll feed you,” and so they did.
After Sam died, someone had said how much they were going to miss having breakfast with Sam at his grandma’s house, and again, Grandma Peggy told them, “If you come, I’ll feed you.” Now for over a year, every Wednesday morning, just around the corner from where I live, 20 to 25 high school kids show up at her doorstep, like debris carried along in some great river. And hearing about it, I was starting to get swept up, too. I had to meet Grandma Peggy. So this unexpected change of course sweeps away my plans for the rest of the morning, and I walked to where my daughter said her house was, knock on the door and introduce myself, “Are you Grandma Peggy?”
We sat on her front porch and visited for the next hour. First, I explained how I had met this Michael that morning. She said, “Oh, yes, he’s a new one to our breakfast club. He started coming in the last few weeks.” During the course of the conversation, as she shared with me about her life, I explained to her what I do for a living, how I talk on this Christian radio program, and that I’d love to tell her story because each week we talk on some passage from the Bible, and that the Bible passage I’d been pondering—which was the important matter I had on my mind that morning in the park when I was trying to ignore some kid with a backpack and a hoodie—the passage I was pondering is this verse from the Bible that says, “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts.”
So, I say to Peggy, “I find out that you had just served breakfast to the same kid I tried to ignore, plus 20 other high school students just around the corner from where I live, and I wanted to meet you because … well, because that love of God that the Bible talks about seems to be flowing out of your heart.” That was exactly what was happening. Here was someone flooded with the love of God, even though she had plenty of reasons not to be.
Peggy told me how it felt that summer when she heard that her grandson had been killed by a drunk driver. Though there were questions about how much the driver had been drinking and whether or not there would be charges pressed or some kind of lawsuit. But none of that really matters now, because the driver, for reasons known only to him and God, shortly after the accident took his own life. Peggy also explained how since her grandson’s death, her husband’s dementia has taken a turn for the worse, and her husband has become her patient. She is a full-time in-home caregiver, and she doesn’t know how much longer she can do this. But she doesn’t want to put him in a home either because she’s got medical issues of her own. She’s been through three rounds of cancer treatments, and it’s taken a toll on her body. Most mornings she just prays God gives her enough strength to get through the day.
I’ve known other people in something like Peggy’s situation. Maybe her situation sounds something like yours. A lot of people who’ve gone through something like that are mad at God. They’ve given up on God and God’s people, the church. I learned that Peggy goes to mass at the local Catholic parish. I asked her if she’s ever mad at God. She said, “Well, I miss Sam, and I don’t know why God let this happen. But I know God made Sam His child, and I know Sam is with God, and I know God gave up His Son so that we could all be with Him forever. That’s the goal of this life, isn’t it?” The more we talked, the more it dawned on me that Peggy was living the very truth of the Bible I’d been trying to memorize that morning. God’s love was being poured out to her and through her.
In case you’re curious, the words from that Bible passage are from one of the early followers of Jesus, a man named Paul. Before following Jesus, Paul spent a lot of his days being mad, mad at the people who were ruining the world. Paul had plenty of reasons to be mad, too, just like us. And Paul knew that God had good reason to be mad. See, Paul had studied the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament. He knew it backwards and forwards. He knew that God had announced that one day judgment was coming, a day just around the corner, when God’s righteous wrath would be poured out like a surge of justice that would break steel cables like cobwebs, a flood, a fire that would crush and tear loose and carry away everything in its path, all the nonsense and wickedness and carelessness that’s ruining the world. God was angry, and Paul was, too, but somehow Paul’s anger had gotten him turned around like anger often does to us. Paul found himself mad at God. Paul didn’t know it at the time, but he was mad at God. Because God himself was right in the middle of this thing that Paul was most mad at, those Christians, those followers of Jesus who kept saying that Jesus is the One who has fixed and is fixing all that is wrong with this world. But at the time, Paul could only see Jesus the way a lot of people see Jesus today, that He’s just some guy from Nazareth. So what can He do? What did He do? Fed some people breakfast, taught some, helped some. Then He got crucified.
But shortly after the crucifixion of Jesus, things changed for Paul. He was raging mad, chasing down Christians, locking them up, when Jesus, risen from the dead, met Paul like a roaring river meets a tiny tributary. Paul got swept up into this Jesus movement. He was baptized in this flood, this mighty current that carries things away and brings something new. One of the new things that it brought to Paul, that Paul wrote about in that letter, was a more profound understanding of God’s love.
See, God wasn’t just an angry judge. God is a loving Father who gave up His only Son. The crucifixion of Jesus reminds us that there is much about the world that is wrong, and much about us that needs to be crushed and torn loose and swept away, much that needs to die. But the cross of Jesus also shows us that the way God did this, the way He did it so that He wouldn’t have to destroy us, was to give up His Son in our place.
When God raised Jesus from the dead, He reconciled Himself to us. He put us in the right with Him. Here’s how Paul says it in that letter, in the 5th chapter. He says, “Therefore, since we have been put right with God by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Through Him, through Jesus, we have access into this favor, this grace in which we now stand, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. And not only this, but we also are rejoicing in the midst of our sufferings, because we know that suffering is producing patient endurance, and patient endurance is producing tested character, and tested character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit whom He has given us. You see, at just the right time, while we were still weak, still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly, for the wicked. Very rarely will someone die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person, someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates His love for us in this, while we were still missing the mark, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Therefore, since we have been now put in the right with God by the blood of Jesus, how much more will we be saved from God’s wrath through Him? Because if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, how much more having been reconciled will we be saved through His life? And not only this, but we also will be saved, rejoicing in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we have now received reconciliation” (Romans 5).
If you were to read Paul’s letter to the Romans, the whole thing, sometimes it’ll be hard to follow. It’s the longest letter Paul wrote, some 7,000 words in the original language, a language, and a style, and a form of argumentation all foreign to us. There’s almost 2,000 years’ worth of debate over the precise meaning of these words. That’s why I was puzzling over these few verses in the middle, in my mind, in the park early that morning, head down, not wanting to be bothered by anyone. But then I got swept up in the flood to which these inspired words point, into the ongoing work of God, to sweep away the old and bring a new creation in Jesus Christ, to carry all in Him to a place just around the corner, where the love of God is still being poured out, and you are welcomed in.
Some days it might sound too good to be true, but I met Grandma Peggy. She’s for real. And all around the world, God is raising up millions of Peggys to show His love, and some Michaels to tell about it, too. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
Reflections for June 18, 2023
Title: Just Around the CornerMark Eischer: And we are back with Lutheran Hour Speaker, Dr. Mike Ziegler.
Mike Zeigler: Hello, Mark!
Mark Eischer: Now, what might your sermon today have been had you not met Mike and Grandma Peggy? Were there other themes or ideas from Romans 5 you were considering?
Mike Zeigler: Thank you for that question. We’ve discussed before about the process I use to prepare to preach. And the place where I start is the Bible text that I’m planning to preach on, and I learn it by heart. Go through the words over and over, let them linger like a good friend or mull them over. And when I was doing that with Romans 5, the phrase that kept coming back to me was “God’s love.” So you hear that God’s love is poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit whom He has given us. We hear that God shows His love or demonstrates His love in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. So, God’s love. I wanted to somehow talk about God’s love. Maybe what kind of love is God’s love?
Mark Eischer: And that word is so ambiguous sometimes. It could mean a lot of different things. You could use it to describe many different feelings. Like I love bacon; I love baseball; I love my grandmother.
Mike Zeigler: Yeah, yeah. It’s one of those words that is very flexible, maybe too flexible. So just in your examples there, bacon, baseball, and your grandma. It’s a strong preference for, it may mean giving praise for, you love the game. You love to watch it. It could mean affection, endearment that you would have towards your grandmother. It could also be romantic love. It could be possessive love. But most often I’ve found that when people are talking about love, they’re expressing how someone or something gives them something good, good feelings, good benefits. We love what that person or thing does for us, the way they enrich our lives. And so in some ways, if you think of it visually, the arrows point back to us when we’re talking about love. But when the Bible speaks of God’s love, the arrows point out, the other way.
Mark Eischer: Because we are not giving God anything He didn’t already have.
Mike Zeigler: Right. God loves not because we are enriching Him in some way. When we love, it’s out of our neediness. But God loves out of abundance and that’s our nature. We are creatures created, which means we are needy by nature. God is Creator, which means He’s abundant by nature. So we can’t give Him anything He didn’t first already give us, that He didn’t have overflowing from His own eternal love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Mark Eischer: So you were already thinking about focusing that sermon on God’s love.
Mike Zeigler: Yes. So I’m meditating on this, walking through the park early one morning and here comes God’s love, like a mighty rushing river, just pulls me, sweeps me up. And I meet Mike, and he’s talking about this grandma that’s not really his grandma. And the things she’s doing for him and his friends is they’re mourning the death of their friend, mourning her grandson’s death. And so it’s just here’s God’s love right there in my own neighborhood. And it’s real. It’s happening right here. And it’s happening in the midst of a tragedy. It’s not wiping away the tragedy or making as though it never happened, but it’s taking that tragedy up into a bigger story of a greater love that’s stronger than death, that’s stronger than sin, that’s bigger, big enough to remake the whole world all over again in Jesus.
Mark Eischer: And this whole thing is another one of those Holy Spirit connections that are there if you have the eyes of faith to see it.
Mike Zeigler: Yes. And so, this is the power when we’re meditating on Scripture and we’ve got our eyes open, that’s when the Holy Spirit does- He loves to do His work.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“With the Lord Begin Your Task” arr. Henry Gerike. From Jubilee by the Concordia Seminary Lutheran Hour Chorus (© 2000 Concordia Seminary Lutheran Hour Chorus)
“God Loved the World So That He Gave” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.